Perfect World
by Sir Gawaine
Summary: Harry, driving home, memories and Christmas. The twelfth in the Harry, Ruth, Kodaline series.


**A/N – This is the only other AU! installment in this series. This is about as fluffy as my fluff gets but with a title like 'Perfect World', what else could I have done? Accidental perfect timing has made this my final offering before Christmas. You'll see why. **

"Harry," Tariq wandered into the office without knocking, a habit he had definitely only picked up since he met Ruth, "Harry, I've finished running that check but I haven't found anything. Do you want me to change the parameters and do it again?"

Tariq sounded eager enough to be getting on with his work but his face and body language was definitely not so keen. He shifted from one foot to another, biting on his bottom lip. His dark hair fell onto his eyes and he pushed it back carelessly. Harry allowed him to stand awkwardly for a moment and really looked at the young man; his t-shirt, emblazoned with some band name Harry had never heard of, was neat but the checked shirt he wore over it was rumpled. He was everything Malcolm had not been, this boy who was the same age Harry had been when he joined the army.

Harry had grown quite fond of him, against his better judgement.

"You can go home, Tariq," he said eventually, "Run it again first thing tomorrow."

The smile of relief told Harry exactly what Tariq had really been thinking. The speed with which he removed himself from the Grid was reminiscent of how Zaf had once been, eager to be away to meet one of his many conquests. The others used to laugh at him, amused by his endless optimism and easy ways. Harry shook himself a little and tore his gaze away from his youngest team member, turning back to the file he was working on. He was getting sentimental in his old age.

Once Tariq was gone, he was alone on the Grid. It was not so late, but Ruth had gone straight home from a conference in Cheltenham and Lucas had removed himself an hour or so earlier, Beth and Dimitri making their excuses soon after. Harry capped his fountain pen and sat back in his chair, gazing down at the unfinished paperwork. With Tariq gone, he loosened his tie and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. A cup of tea, long cold, sat on the corner of the desk. He couldn't remember who had brought it to him, as Ruth hadn't been in at all that day. It had probably been Dimitri – the man was considerate in a way that young men like him often were not, much more than Harry had been at his age.

He glanced at the whisky on the side table and considered a glass, but it was gone eight and his neck ached from a day at his desk. Rolling his head carefully, he cleared his throat and pushed back his chair. He was so tired. It was time to be going.

Lucas' car was still in the underground car park when Harry got there, bundled up in a scarf and coat against the December chill. He unlocked his own car and considered Lucas' for a moment. He must have taken himself off to one of the bars he liked to frequent, with the friends that none of them could quite believe he had managed to keep hold of after his long absence. He would most likely arrive in the morning with a sore head and an even bigger bag of pastries than he usually carried in. Ruth had been the one to ask the question soon after she re-joined the team, the one to ask if Lucas had a fixation on food that stemmed from his years of near starvation and if they should be worried about him. Harry had been relieved to answer that Lucas had been like that for as long as he had known him, that Russia had done nothing more than exasperate a little quirk he had long fostered. When it came to Lucas, they had blessedly little to be concerned about; he had borne his hardships better than Harry could ever have dared hope he would.

Harry eased his car from the space and drove slowly towards the gate. The car park attendant, a forever smiling elderly man named Ted, saluted from his booth as he let the gate up.

"Goodnight son," he called, waving his crossword book in the air, "Almost finished eight today!"

"Nine tomorrow then," Harry called back, his hand extended in goodbye, "Have a good evening, Ted."

The streets were busy enough for a Friday late in December but at least the traffic was moving. Harry turned up the heater and flicked on the radio. BBC Radio 4 crackled into life. It wasn't his usual station but Ruth had chosen it when he had given her a lift into work yesterday and he hadn't changed it since. A heated argument was taking place, a radio play, and he almost changed the channel before he recognised some of the names and realised it was a serialisation of 'The Heart of the Matter', perhaps his favourite Graham Greene novel.

Well, that was decided then.

It was not a happy story, that was for sure, but Greene just had a way of reaching into an ordinary's man heart and finding the poetry there. A man who desperately wanted to do good but sometimes could not, a man who loved desperately but could never find the words to say how or why he did. In recent years, the story had hit closer to home than Harry would have liked but for some reason he kept going back. He had given the book to Adam once, told him to read it and to really think about it. Adam had never made a comment on it but Harry knew he had absorbed every word. Perhaps he should give it to Lucas too. That would make a full set of his recent senior officers – Tom had read every word Greene had ever written long before he ever joined Five. Well, a full set of the male ones anyway. Ros had never needed guidance of that kind. She was stronger than all of them put together, Harry included.

_God, he missed her._

The thought came to his mind unbidden and he was amazed to feel hot tears prickling in his eyes. He reached up and roughly wiped them away, not sure who he was hiding them from. His fellow drivers cared nothing for the middle aged man in the nice car who had tears on his face. They had places to be.

Well, so did he. He switched the radio to Classic FM and continued his drive in a much more collected fashion. The Christmas lights that plastered London every year seemed to have multiplied beyond measure, every little square sporting a tree at least and often more. He wondered what London looked like from the air at Christmas time, whether someone in a helicopter could have picked out the major sights just from the concentration of lights around them. It was probably really something to see.

The traffic thinned out a little away from the centre of the city and he managed to move the car up to the third gear for the rest of his drive home. His neighbours, ever more conservative than the masses, had a much more sedate approach to Christmas than the rest of London. Tasteful lights, tiny white pinpricks in the dark, decorated a feature in the front gardens of a few houses, and one house had even gone so far as to opt for blue lights instead. The rest had candles in the windows and wreathes on the front doors, the picture postcard of middle-class England.

The candles in his own front window were lit and he couldn't help but smile when he saw them. Her car was not here but she must be.

He let himself in the front door quietly, the exact music he had just left on the radio now streaming quietly from the kitchen.

"Ruth," he called softly, "Ruth, what are you doing here?"

She appeared at the door of the kitchen, wrapped in his apron which she wore, he saw, over one of his woollen jumpers. She smiled softly and shrugged.

"The conference finished early. I thought I would make you dinner, if you're interested."

She came to him them and, reaching up, unwrapped the scarf from around his neck. As she pulled it away, she leaned in and kissed him lightly.

"I knew I gave you a key for a reason," Harry said, knowing he was grinning like a half-wit, but hardly caring, "This is a lovely surprise."

She allowed him to kiss her again, a little deeper this time, before she pushed him gently away and went back to the kitchen.

"It will be another twenty minutes. You have time to shower, if you want to."

"OK."

He climbed the stairs slowly, listening to her humming along to the radio. He hardly knew how they had come to this, how he had come to this state of utter contentment. One day he was proposing – _proposing_ – at Ros' funeral and Ruth was turning him down, and the next she was asking him for a drink and asking if he could be happy with this instead, happy with a promise instead of a commitment, a future instead of a present.

_A partner instead of a wife._

He'd said yes.

What else did she expect him to say?

He'd been terrified at first; terrified of her changing her mind, terrified of scaring her away again, terrified of finally getting what he had longed for. Terrified of what would happen if someone else found out, just like last time.

She had sensed his terror.

She had told them herself.

She'd just said it one day, made some innocuous comment that could not be misinterpreted, not even by Tariq. Lucas had raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Beth had pinned Ruth with a look that said they would be discussing this at another time. Dimitri and Tariq had exchanged a smile and later Harry caught them hunched over a calculator and a battered notebook. He decided he didn't want to know.

And that was it.

After everything that had happened, after all of the times it had been an almost and all of the times it had been a never, it suddenly _was_.

It just was.

And Harry couldn't remember a time he had been happier.


End file.
